A Brief History of the Fourth City Sisters as We Know It

In early 2018, the Fourth City Sisters were founded to replace the previous incarnation of the Sisters in St. Louis, the Fleur de Lys Sisters, which had two iterations, and had replaced the first incarnation of the Sisters in St. Louis, the Gateway City Sisters.

The second incarnation of the Fleur De Lys Sisters had performed various acts of malfeasance including the keeping of house funds in a freezer, which is the BIGGEST thing you must prepare yourself to hear over and over and over by other houses. They also allowed their 501c3 to lapse, at which time another house reported them to San Francisco and their trademark was revoked.

The Fourth City is St. Louis. In the early 1900s, the city was listed as the fourth biggest city in the USA, and though it is most likely that the numbers were padded and bribes were made to do so, that is how they attracted the World’s Fair of 1904 aka the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. It’s an obscure nickname, but not only does it touch on the city’s history, it also symbolizes the fourth incarnation of the Sisters in St. Louis.

Abbey of the Glittering Arch was also chosen at that time, as seen on some of our original legal documents and P&Ps. The origin of that name is, I should think, fabulously obvious.

The Founding Members of the Fourth City Sisters were (at the time of the founding): Sister EllaWhore von Tramp, Sister Lucy Fear, Sister Freedom Bubbles, Sister Belly Davis, Sister Busta Nutt, and Guard Mame O. Reese, though we lost Sister EllaWhore von Tramp to the Nuns of the Above and the other Founders went their own separate ways along the path. Since the beginning of our house Sistory, Bar:PM has been our Home Bar, and Shameless Grounds has been our traditional location for General Meetings and Board Meetings.

In December 2018, we were elevated to mission status, and we really meant business! A Mission House is a house still proving its worth to the global sisterhood. We continued our ministry of safer sex outreach, human rights for the LGBT+ community (specifically our transgender siblings), and a general mission of spreading joy, increasing visibility, and promoting the safety of our community.

In March of 2019, we held our first (and so far only) Annual Fish Fry, and were joined for the first time by new Aspirants, most notably Mary Kissorkill (now Mairy Godmother). In June of 2019, our first Abbess, Sister Ellawhore Von Tramp, succumbed to anger and depression and took their own life. In this tragedy, we were left in a lurch of emotional upheaval. Then came a whirlwind of activity including many large scale projects’ conception: Sister Mairy’s Drag Story Time project; The Annual Rummage Sale, a large fundraising event by Mimosa Bellini and Mairy Godmother and partnered with PrideCenter St. Louis; the AutumnFest Trunk or Treat with Mairy Godmother and Wilde Knights as well as Mimosa Bellini, also partnered with Pride STL; Bellabook Anne Candle’s Pageantry and Bar Ministry; Chichi Sugar Leche’s Mindfulness Mondays; Justice Furall’s Affirmation Drive; the MTUG Supply Drive and the Covid Relief Aid project in 2020; and many other projects both large and small that earned us what we’d been working so hard to achieve:

In late 2020, during the pandemic, the United Nun Privy Council voted to elevate our humble mission to a Fully Professed House of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. In March of 2021, Sister Mary Godmother was the first of our Sisters to receive her Black Veil from the hands of Sisters Glamarama Ding Dong and Cheez Whiz Fabulous at the Art Museum in Kansas City. Shortly after that, at Easter, she bestowed that same veil to Sister Lucy Fear. In May of 2021, after a time of internal turmoil and some interpersonal chaos, Sister Mairy resigned from the Fourth City Sisters. Much of the following few years of the house were a shadow of their former selves due the Covid Pandemic, but ministry was kept alive virtually through Kitty Sprinkles’ continuation of an online Sister Story Time; food and supply drives made to MTUG, Mindfulness Mondays, and other outreach. Sister Lady Promiscuous Rex’s personal project called Charity Noodles helped raise hundreds of dollars for unemployed or underpaid artists in the city.
However, by December of 2023, due to reasons of their own (in no small part affected by other houses), the original board members and founders either left the house altogether or lost the drive and allowed the 501c3 status of the house to lapse. That month during the UNPC call, they announced that the house would be dissolved and there would be no more Fourth City Sisters.

Sister Mary Godmother did not wish to let that stand, and begged and pleaded and made concessions and promises to the old board to be allowed to take over the 501c3, and with the help of Sisters Cardi-Oid K’Boom, Flambeé la Reine, Sybil LiberTease, and Mimosa Bellini, as well as Novice Sister Kitty Sprinkles and a trio of new Aspirants that we like to call the Wyrd Sisters: Amanita, Devoida, and Anastasia, we began the process of restructuring and revitalizing the house into what it is today.